Dust to Dust
by petals-to-fish
Summary: "The cancer chips away at his body like a sculptor chips at marble stone." A muggle!Jily cancer AU because some anon on tumblr wants to watch the world burn. Rated M for feels.


**I own nothing.**

 **Wrote this for an anon who requited James dying with cancer because they wanted me to cry.**

 **it was very...rough...to pull these feelings out.**

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The hospital had sent the test results via the post.

It's hard for Lily to understand how the man who sits next to her, holding her hand so firmly, can possibly be torn up on the inside when he is pure ambition on the outside. James is only twenty years old and still has his whole life ahead of him; a life with Lily that only just started when they got married in the courthouse on Market Street. He couldn't be dying, that was fucked up. What kind of God allowed someone as pure as James to get sick?

Lily suddenly wanted nothing more than to go back to the night before when they were dancing under the lights of their living room while listening to The Beatles on repeat.

"Are you frightened?" she murmurs.

"Not as long as you stay by my side." He smiles goofily at her, winking in his charming way.

She promises sweetly, "Until the very end."

He'd gone to the doctor in question after he broke his arm easily on a football scrimmage. Before the arm, he'd been struggling to stay energized and was drinking close to ten cups of coffee a day and Lily had been worried he was over working himself. He complained of feeling weakened after a trip to the shore and finally the doctors had figured out what was wrong.

Cancer had taken over his bones and was destroying him from the inside out.

It's not in James' eyes; the worry only presents itself in the test results. Her fingers trace the ink on the paper and her mind memorizes the fatigued expression on his face. Lily's hand drops the paper and it falls on the table so she can wrap her arms around James' shoulders without restriction. He pulls her in appreciatively, kissing her temple softly.

"It'll be fine," he gives her promises he can't keep, "I'll get through the chemo then we can go back to normal and have a family."

At first, James seems to be telling the truth. He refuses to quit his job at the local football field and he keeps running every morning before she gets up. He makes her dinners on Saturdays and kisses her frowns into smiles on Sundays. They can almost forget that James Potter is sick…until the chemo begins to take its toll.

It starts with him refusing to get up and run in the mornings, instead he stays curled up against her side, and she cannot complain. Suddenly he struggles to get up and out of bed all together. Lily helps him dress and make breakfast. He goes to work until he passes out one day on the job. The doctors warn James that he's over extending himself and could make the process worse if he doesn't slow down.

James is forced to quit his job and it kills his calm disposition.

"What good is laying around all day like a dead man if I'm trying to live?"

It's not the way he says it that bothers her, but the dead look in his eyes when he says it.

Lily takes time off from work to help James through the next few months. She watches as he stands in front of the mirror and shaves all of his thick black hair from his head because it's falling out in clumps anyways. He throws up in the middle of the night and Lily stays with him, bent over the toilet, as he struggles to maintain positive.

The next few months seem to eat away at the armor he'd put up when they first learned he was sick. James tries to act brave and strong enough for the both of them but he knows that nothing he says can ease her worrying mind.

Christmas rolls around and he surprises her with a brand new diamond ring, set in rose gold, engraved with the words ' _until the very end'_. Lily cries and he makes a joke about her being ridiculously sentimental. Lily kisses him under the Christmas lights and when she closes her eyes she can almost imagine that he's healthy once again but her fingers feel his ribs beneath his shirt.

The cancer chips away at his body like a sculptor chips at marble stone.

It's an early January morning that gives his tangible discomfort away. Lily finds him buried in blankets on the sofa alone and he is crying. He has a box of photos on his lap. Lily spots the smiling healthy face of James Potter before the cancer. She stares at the unruly black hair and the sparkling hazel eyes. It was a stark contrast from the broken and bitter man sitting on her sofa.

Through his thin disguise of being fine, Lily never noticed how badly James been drowning in his own worries. Seven bottles rest atop the first stack of medicals bills they'd already paid with the money from his parents. All of the bottles are empty and when Lily picks them up without saying anything to James, they echo through the room like the ghost of church bells.

Lily refuses to let James see her cry and the doctors are good at perfectly delivered lines.

"It's time you both start thinking about the future."

Instead of shopping for baby prams they are looking at gravestones. James wants Lily to write his will, leaving everything to her of course, but Lily can even get past the first sentence without excusing herself to go cry in the bathroom. She doesn't fool herself. She feels guilty that when she looks at him, she holds her breath. He's started to lose pieces of himself. His eyes don't sparkle when the cat curls up next to him on the sofa. When his best mates come to visit he doesn't talk to them, or attempt to make them laugh. The medicine is making him sour and bitter. He wants nothing more than to drink his troubles away—but he is ordered to stay sober.

Lily still loves him though. She loves the quiet moments she gets with him when he wakes up from a dull sleep. She loves when his fingers, bony and yellow, trace her hips in the darkness under the sheets. Lily stares into his eyes in the mornings after breakfast, remembering when those eyes used to have passion and worth. She is love with him even when he cannot love himself.

"You should just leave." He begs her as she helps him up the stairs when walking becomes too much, "You deserve someone better than me."

She kisses his fingertips affectionately, "I meant what I said, until the _very_ end. I am not leaving you."

He tries his hardest to hide how much it hurts him when she has to quit her job at the library. They'd both worked hard for the life they'd had. They'd both supported and pushed each other to their goals. It had always been the James and Lily Show. Sure, they didn't always see eye to eye, but Lily had always counted on James to be her anchor.

Now though, Lily was being the anchor for both of them.

James is like a walking ghost. He hardly ever speaks, lips chapped and face pale if he does anything that exerts more energy than he can expend. Lily can tell it frustrates him to be so utterly useless; he's never been good at sitting still for too long. James tries more than once to take care of himself in wake of Lily quitting her job.

She catches him in the kitchen, staring at one of their knives as if it was his only option. She races forward and knocks the knife from his hand, planting kisses all over his guilty face. Lily wraps her arms around James' withering form, begging him to never leave her. He begs her to let him go.

"I don't want to live like this." He cries.

"I don't want to live without you." She manages to gasp.

It is a give and take that neither James nor Lily is willing to fight for to the death.

Of course, some days are good.

Some days, James wakes up and he almost looks like his old self. Sometimes when she kisses him she feels his lips curve into a playful smirk. Sometimes when her hand brushes against the top of his head, her fingers imagine pulling at his long-gone black tresses. Sometimes he stands up from the sofa and takes her in his arms for a quick dance. Sometimes he whispers 'I love you' and she can feel the same flames for him she felt when they were teenagers.

A year into chemo and he is still holding his head up when the world outside of their home is looking in. The doctors tell them that the chemo appears to be finally working, but James might need a bone marrow transplant. They struggle to find a match as James moves in full time to the hospital. His care is now at the hands of nurses and doctors who deal with death everyday. Lily sits in the corner of the curtained rooms colored grey, watching her husband only grow weaker every day. She doesn't know how much longer she can sit by and watch James die slowly. She wants to run away but she cannot leave him because she knows that were the situations reversed, he'd never leave her no matter how scared he was.

"I don't want to do this anymore." He says to her sadly in the hospice bed, "I want to die."

He's fought the fight for so long that he doesn't even remember when the fight started. Lily remembers though, she remembers watching him weaken. She can clearly remember the little boy in the back of her mind, the one who sat next to her on the bus to school when they were kids. The boy who ran the fastest in Year Three and who ended up running his way right into her heart. She remembered his hair, which had been so dark and unruly that she'd offered to buzz it off for him. She missed his hair now that she wished she could go back in time and tell her younger self what she knew now.

James' bone marrow transplant happened on Christmas. Lily spent her Christmas huddled in the corner of the hospital with a cup of hot chocolate laced with baileys. James' friends were there too, all offering their support to Lily as she waited to hear if James made it or not. At midnight they let her back into his room and he looks so thin and broken on the bed that she half sobs into her hand as she falls to her knees by his bedside.

She cries, "I _can't_ live without you."

James get's better under the transplant but the scars are now permanent. When his eyes open again they find her and they are broken. The damage is done and James Potter has become an empty shell of the man that he was. He compares the medicines they inject into his body to poison.

He says the fire licks through his blood and he doesn't know how to stop the burning.

It burns at his spirit.

Burns at his mind.

Burns at their relationship.

Nevertheless she holds his hand and talks to him through the night. She surprises him with a visit from their cat Algernon. James holds the cat tightly and Lily takes a picture that she develops and tucks into her purse for a rainy day. The hospital staff loves them and allows Lily to bring in Algernon once a week.

"Half the fight is mental."

That's what the doctors told Lily and mentally, James had given up. He stared at the hospital ceiling and hardly moved. They fed him through tubes and kept him hydrated with IV's. Lily didn't talk to him as much anymore, mostly because she was afraid she bothered him with her consistent babbling. It's like trying to talk to a wall and she couldn't tear the wall down.

They are both lonely despite seeing each other everyday.

Talking has become hard for James.

Living has become hard for James.

His time was ticking to a stop.

His kidneys go into failure and the doctor's wheel him away from Lily in panic. After hydrating and removing one of the kidneys…they bring James back to her alive but with a new scar on his skin. Lily stays in bed with him that night, her arms lightly wrapped around his thin form. He wakes up from mid dream and their eyes meet. There is sadness there in his hazel orbs that will haunt her for the rest of her days.

"Listen to me." She murmurs into his skin, "You have to fight this. I want my husband back."

She hopes a miracle will see them through but when she looks in the mirror all she can see is the blue and purple skin under her eyes from lack of sleep. All she can see is the way her clothes hang on her body like curtains, keeping light from reaching her. The hospital lights make her skin look pale and the happiness had gone from her green eyes. She couldn't step into their house without being reminded of everything they couldn't have. She couldn't look at James lying in bed without being reminded that she was days away from becoming a widow.

His skin is so thin and papery that she's worried he is turning to dust.

She stands in their living room, insanely hoping, wishing, and praying for a change. Lily hasn't prayed since she was a little girl at mass but she prayed everyday damn night. She prayed fate would give her something other than blind optimism because James wasn't going to make it and she didn't know how to face reality. Standing there, basking in her sorrow, she thinks she can hear James' voice from the kitchen, calling her for breakfast. She thinks she can smell the coffee grinds and hear the radio singing their favorite song. She remembers the feel of his hands on her face, telling her it would be all right.

But it wasn't all right.

Not even close.

Flowers pile up on her countertops and he's not even dead yet. Red roses, blue daffodils, white lilies. The lilies hurt the most. She should've known life was going to be unpleasant to a woman named after the flower that represented death itself. She resented her parents for naming her Lily. She resented all the flowers on her doorstep. She burned them all in her fireplace while sobbing into the crystal vases.

James is discharged from the hospital, taken off all medication, and sent back home to Lily. Sirius, James' best mate, helps Lily wheel James into the living room. James looks like he survived a walk from hell and back. Sirius sets him up on the sofa before telling Lily to call him the moment anything changes. Sirius leaves with tears on his cheeks, knowing he said goodbye to James Potter a long time ago.

Lily couldn't ever bring herself to say goodbye, not even now.

The doctors gave him no more than twenty-four hours.

Lily cannot sleep.

She stares at him until she can't anymore. She stares at him until the fire dies and there is nothing but the sound of his light breathing. She sits next to the sofa, her hands wrapped in his, waiting for the warmth to leave his body. She was waiting to hear his soft exhales stop. She was waiting for his hazel eyes to close. She was waiting for the uncontrollable tears to streak down her face.

At twenty-four hours exactly, Lily holds a bated breath. She stares at him, waiting, waiting…waiting. Nothing happens. James continues to lay there, eyes closed, breathing softly into his pillow. Twenty-four hours and one minute later he is still alive. At twenty-six hours he opens his eyes and smiles at her when he sees her staring anxiously. At forty-three hours the doctors came to the house on call and exclaim how James is a miracle.

"What's going on?" she asks.

James is doing better off the medications than on them. The doctors don't promise her anything but they do bring him back to the hospital. They keep him off the medications, except for pain meds. Color returns to James' shallow cheeks and Lily's life. He gains a whole pound and a half. His fingers begin to twitch. He hums in his sleep.

It's going to be a long road to recovery but she isn't afraid because hope is finally shining like a beacon in her heart when James wakes and whispers to her, "Until the very end."

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 **I need six shots of tequila and a hug.**


End file.
